This is probably a little early but I thought this photoessay in Time Magazine, telling a rather ambivalent tale about the production, marketing, and consumption of blue jeans would be rather useful for our discussion for Week 15 on labour and the fashion industry. I'll put it up before I forget about it and we could always come back to it in future.
Here's the link -- http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1679983_1479035,00.html
The images are beautiful and poignant but I wonder what the photographer's thesis is. On the one hand he/she appears to be critical of the garment industry and the hidden side of its labour practices (e.g. image 5, which is the one above). On the other, he/she seems to approve of the thousands of jobs created by the garment industry in "developing" countries (image 2), and adopts a slightly euphoric tone with regards to the popularity of denim worldwide. Visually, swanky denim advertisements with a topless Heidi Klum are juxtaposed with shots of labourers in the factories bending over their work.
The ambivalence in this photoessay probably reflects the ambiguous and complex nature of the fashion labour industry itself.
It also brings to mind how denim is fetishized in the U.S., which was something I noticed rather early on upon moving to California. No other female fashion magazines I've encountered pay such tribute to the humble blue jean. And the denim jean industry (referring to both the number of design houses, scale of consumer interest. etc) is massive here, more so than anywhere else I've encountered. I'm pretty sure one might be able situate this fascination with the fabric amid political-historical studies of the place of cotton, cotton plantations, and its accompanying racial politics, in American cultural history. Interesting how these politics of racially determined labour with regard to the cotton industry have been supposedly displaced onto the vertices of transnational capitalism, but nevertheless are still played out along ethnic-national lines.
Cant wait till week 15.
Thanks for posting this. The 'ambiguity' you bring up is interesting because it echoes the sort of cliche justification for colonialism to this day in Europe. It goes something like "Yes, we exploited them but we also brought them education, institutions and coca-cola - we civilized them". So what we may read, generously, as "ambiguity" might be more like a cheap contradiction?
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